War and Peace: Almost Done Edition

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Napoleon is at the gates of Moscow, seems like it'll work out well for him.

Two striking things at this time:

1. War is always in the background of the book, but it spends most of its time as a purely domestic drama with Austerlitz as a kind of setpiece happening far away and of little import to anyone else. And then, gradually, there is nothing but war, even as the characters try to deny it and continue on as normal. 

But of course, war was there throughout the book, impacting people's lives in real ways they just kind of discounted and pretended didn't exist. Napoleon and Alexander don't really change at all. The system of things, as Tolstoy says repeatedly about war, depends on the spur of the moment decisions of regular, ordinary people working in concert (or not). The war machine can't hum without people thinking of military service as noble, the forced raising of troops as a fact of life, and the increased taxation to support those wars as logical. 

And so it seems that if you are ever to find yourself in a world where real life, whatever that is, seems caught up in the machinations of powerful people far away from you, it is almost certainly the case that it has in fact been like that for awhile, and you have chosen not to see it, and by choosing not to see it, brought it on yourself. (A connection, perhaps, with Sartre in Being and Nothingness "if there is a war, it is my war, in my own image, and I am responsible for it")

NB this is not an endorsement of this line of thinking, just a sketch of it. Though I do think people go to great lengths to pretend to not know what they're doing, so they can treat the consequences of their decisions as inevitable.

2. When I read War and Peace in college, I wrote my essay on Pierre, though I now remember nothing at all about it. What strikes me the most about Pierre this time around is not his successive attempts to change, nor the futility of them, but that he remains basically the same person he was at the beginning of the book: a more-or-less good person with some serious flaws but who can rise to the occasion when the occasion presents itself. And as I get older and have observed myself (and other people) for longer, this is pretty much what I see: the external trappings might change, you might graft yourself onto a different plant than the one you started on, but the person doesn't really change that much.